Facebook tests mobile payments tool

Facebook is planning to test a mobile payments feature which will automatically fill in payment details when purchasing on mobile apps.

The social networking giant will be able to take payment details from users who have added them to their Facebook account. These will then be automatically generated into forms when purchasing on a mobile device.

Facebook would not handle the payment processing – that service would remain with the application through services such as PayPal and Braintree.

Facebook said the service was to create a "simpler commerce experience" which would help customers filling in lengthy payment details on a small touchscreen device.

In June, the company admitted that a bug caused the phone numbers and email addresses of six million users to be shared unintentionally. While the bug was fixed in a day, it may lead users to be wary of storing payment details with the social network in the future.

At the moment, the mobile payments industry is very fragmented with no single system dominating the market.

A survey earlier this year stated that PayPal and mobile banking apps were the most dominant technology with 64% and 60% of users choosing these platforms to handle their transactions. Google wallet only attracts 11% of respondents, while 10% said they would use QR codes and 7% said they would use Paytags.

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Facebook blames a bug for the disappearance of posts about same-sex marriage

Some recent cases of news articles about same-sex marriage disappearing from the newspaper page on Facebook appear to have been caused by a bug and not a policy violation, the social network said.

Several regional daily newspapers, such as The Mercury serving Pottstown, Pennsylvania, started seeing in late July that stories covering developments on the issue of same-sex marriage were mysteriously disappearing from their pages on Facebook. A post Friday at the website for the Poynter Institute, a journalism education and training center, called attention to the issue.

"In all likelihood this was a bug and not a policy violation," a Facebook spokeswoman said Friday, referring specifically to The Mercury's issues. If it had been a policy violation, the page administrators would have received a notification of the article removals, which they did not, Facebook said.

The circumstances surrounding some of the posts' disappearances are a bit odd. At The Mercury, for instance, online editor Eileen Faust noticed the trend when a local county began issuing licenses to same-sex couples on July 24. Roughly five to six articles disappeared from Facebook after they were posted, she said, but no stories covering other topics disappeared in a similar way.

The articles that disappeared covered news dng with both support and opposition to same-sex marriage, she said.

The paper has not experienced any major issues with articles disappearing since then, but that may only be because The Mercury has not been posting as many articles on same-sex marriage, Faust said.

"We're going to keep an eye on this," she added in an interview.

The Mercury's posts on same-sex marriage have since been restored to the paper's page on Facebook, the social network said.

Other regional newspaper companies, such as 21st Century Media papers in the Philadelphia region and papers owned by the Los Angeles News Group, have also noticed that their stories on same-sex marriage have disappeared from their Facebook pages, The Mercury reported in its coverage of the issue.

21st Century Media and the Los Angeles News Group could not be immediately reached to comment.

Though The Mercury paper's issues were probably caused by a bug or some kind of glitch, Facebook said, the issue did arise just before the company announced an aggressive new strategy to better detect controversial content on its site that may be violent, graphic or sexual in nature.

Facebook has a complicated way for classifying what is offensive content and what is not. In terms of graphic content, "We understand that graphic imagery is a regular component of current events, but must balance the needs of a diverse community," the site says in its community standards.

The Mercury's Faust said she would like to have a more direct contact at Facebook to communicate with when issues occur. "We can't easily connect or get a response from them," she said.

http://www.freeprwebdirectory.com/business_and_economy/law/

New York Post Twitter and Facebook accounts hacked by Syrian Electronic Army

The New York Post is the latest media outlet to be targeted by Syrian Electronic Army, with the hacker group temporarily taking control of the publication's social media accounts.

The online activists successfully took over the New York Post's Facebook account before posting SEA-related material on Tuesday, and also gained access to a number of employees' Twitter accounts, according to a post on the group's website.

A number of journalist's were affected, with a tweet on reporter Mike Puma's account stated "Syrian Electronic Army was here".

The New York Post has not revealed any more details of the hack, though has since regained control over its social media accounts.

The SEA also compromised the Twitter feed and Facebook account of social media management company Social Flow. The firm stated on Tuesday that the hack was the result of a phishing attack which granted the hackers access to its accounts.

A tweet from Social Flow's official account read: "Today an employee's email account was compromised in a phishing attack. As a result, our Twitter and FB accounts were compromised."

Social Flow added that no customer access or data was compromised, and the firm "immediately took our service offline" as part of security controls.



The SEA has succeeded in hacking into the social media accounts of a number of high profile media firms, including the Guardian and Channel 4 in recent weeks, while other media outlets such as BSkyB and Reuters have been on the receiving end of attacks in recent months.

Although the hacks have mostly resulted in the defacing of Twitter or Facebook accounts, in some instances the hacks have had wider repercussions. False information posted on the Associated Press Twitter feed led to financial markets falling sharply, highlighting the danger of social media monitoring tools employed by traders.

Twitter has since made moves to allay security concerns by introducing two step authentication, though questions remain over whether this will stop attacks.

Facebook disables some legitimate apps while targeting malicious ones

The use of tools to detect malicious patterns in apps led Facebook to temporarily disable some legitimate third-party apps that integrate with the social networking website, it said Thursday.

On Tuesday, a number of people complained that their Facebook developer accounts and apps were unavailable.

Facebook said it uses automated systems to identify and disable malicious apps, so as to protect its platform and users. These techniques identify a malicious pattern, find the apps that match that pattern, and then disable those apps.

"This normally results in thousands of malicious apps being disabled and improves our automated systems' ability to detect similar attacks in the future," Facebook employee Eugene Zarakhovsky wrote in a blog post.

But on Tuesday, Facebook started with a broad pattern that correctly matched many thousands of malicious apps but also matched many high-quality apps.

"When we detected this error, we immediately stopped the process and began work to restore access," Zarakhovsky wrote. "The process took longer than expected because of the number of apps affected and bugs related to the restoration of app metadata."



Facebook did not say how many legitimate apps were affected.

The company now plans to make improvements to its processes and technology, including better tools to identify overly broad patterns and better processes to verify that all the apps matched are in fact malicious. It will also address the bugs and bottlenecks that slowed down the recovery process.

Facebook has been unveiling tools to get developers to integrate their apps with its platform. In April it announced plans to acquire Parse, a cloud-based platform that provides cross-platform services and tools for developers. "By making Parse a part of Facebook Platform, we want to enable developers to rapidly build apps that span mobile platforms and devices," it said at the time.

Facebook embedded posts good for business

Facebook announced a new program this week that lets websites post public Facebook posts to their sites. And that could be a boon for businesses, says industry analysts.

“This could be very attractive to Facebook’s business users,” said Dan Olds, an analyst with The Gabriel Consulting Group. “With this, they might be able to capture positive customer comments and append them to their webpages or other marketing material. Since the post retains the Facebook formatting, I think it conveys a greater sense that the statement is genuine and unsolicited.”

On Wednesday, Facebook announced that it was launching the embedded posts program.

The embedded post will show any pictures or video attached to it, as well as the number of likes, shares, and comments that the post has, according to the social network. Only public posts from Facebook Pages and profiles can be embedded.

“Embedding posts will let people using your website see the same rich information that is shown on Facebook.com, and they will enable people to follow or like content authors or Pages directly from the embed,” the company noted in a blog post.

At this point, the program is only available to what Facebook calls a “handful” of news publishers. A broader rollout is being planned.

This embedded program will help Facebook reach beyond its own site and get even more eyeballs on Facebook content, noted Patrick Moorhead, an analyst with Moor Insights & Strategy.

But this isn’t just good for Facebook. It’s also good for enterprises that want to show off what users are saying about them on the world’s biggest social network.

“This could improve the Web experience for these sites by enabling real-time content and interactions with their customers,” said Moorhead. “This increases stickiness [on their websites] and increases the chances users won’t bail out.”

Any business, like Ford Motor Company or JetBlue Airways or even a small mom-and-pop shop, eventually will be able to sift through Facebook to find complimentary posts from consumers, and then use the posts on their websites and in their online sales and marketing materials.

As usual though, this could be a double-edge sword.

Olds noted that while one company could be embedding positive posts about itself, its competitor could be embedding negative posts about it on its own site.

However, Zeus Kerravala, an analyst with ZK Research, said there are far more upsides to this for businesses.

“If I’m JetBlue and I had a user rave about a JetBlue flight, I could grab the post and put it on my site,” he said. “It gives the same look and feel of Facebook. It’s familiar to people.” “It’s like having a bunch of mini Facebooks all over the place,” Kerravala said.

Facebook Briefly Trades Above I.P.O. Price

On Wednesday morning, shares of the world’s leading social network traded above $38 a share, the price at which the company first sold shares to the public more than a year ago.

The immediate catalyst for the rise was the company’s surprisingly strong second-quarter earnings report last Wednesday, which quelled many investors’ doubts about the company’s ability to make money from its legions of mobile users, and suggested that the company’s profit stream was growing.

Since last week’s report, shares have risen more than 40 percent. Early Wednesday, they touched $38.31 a share, although at midday, they were slightly below $37.

The company’s shares hit a low of $17.55 last fall, but since then investors have warmed to the company. Facebook has shown signs that it can significantly grow its advertising base and keep its 1.2 billion users engaged, despite competition from rival social networks like Twitter and other social sharing sites like Pinterest.

“Facebook was caught flat-footed by the shift to mobile,” said Mark Mahaney, an analyst with RBC Capital Markets. “It took them four or five quarters to catch up.”

Now, he said, “they appear to be set up as a sustainable high-growth business.”

Mr. Mahaney, whose firm has a $40 price target on the stock, said that across Wall Street, analysts had increased their projections of the company’s financial performance. Analysts now expect Facebook to grow its profits 30 to 35 percent a year through 2015.

Since stocks tend to trade as a multiple of a company’s future profits, those upgrades last week sent Facebook’s stock soaring.

Still, there are reasons to be concerned. Mobile messaging platforms like Snapchat and Whatsapp are grabbing the attention of many of Facebook’s younger users. Twitter is mounting a major effort to go after marketers, especially brands that typically advertise on television, as it prepares for its own likely public offering.

And Facebook risks turning off users with too many ads. Currently about 1 in 20 items in the news feed, the main flow of items that a Facebook user sees, are ads. During the company’s quarterly conference call with analysts, Mark Zuckerberg, the company’s chief executive, said that users were beginning to notice the number of ads, suggesting that the company cannot greatly increase their frequency without losing some users.

Although the company raised $16 billion from the initial public offering in May 2012, problems immediately followed.

The Nasdaq stock exchange botched the handling of buy and sell orders on the first day of trading. (A few months ago, regulators fined Nasdaq $10 million fine for the fiasco.) And in ensuing weeks, shares continued to fall. Many Wall Street investors questioned whether Facebook’s stock was truly worth $38 a share at the time of the offering.

Particularly worrisome was Facebook’s seemingly nonexistent mobile strategy at a time when Internet users were abandoning PCs for their smartphones. The company’s smartphone and iPad applications were clunky, and it was generating no revenue from mobile ads.

Facebook’s management, including Mr. Zuckerberg, recognized the problem and embarked on a crash course to revamp the company’s approach to mobile and better position the company for fast-growing emerging markets.

The company overhauled its apps, introduced ads into its users’ news feeds, and created a lucrative new category of revenue called app install ads. With the app install ads, a game maker, for example, can promote its new game in Facebook’s mobile software and give users an easy way to install the app with just a couple of clicks.

At the same time, Facebook introduced new advertising products meant to give marketers ways to more directly target specific groups of customers, which allowed the service to command higher advertising rates.

While mobile advertising continues to grow, and was about 41 percent of Facebook’s ad revenue in the second quarter, investors are also looking to new areas of potential profit growth. Those include video advertising in the news feed, which is expected to begin later this year, and the possible sale of ads in Instagram, the fast-growing photo and video sharing app that Facebook bought in 2012.

“All of those seem like relatively large low-hanging fruit, and they are starting to go after them,” Mr. Mahaney said. 

Facebook invents a PHP virtual machine

Social networking giant Facebook has taken another step at making the PHP Web programming language run more quickly. The company has developed a PHP Virtual Machine that it says can execute the language as much as nine times as quickly as running PHP natively on large systems.

"Our goal is to make PHP run really, really quickly," said Joel Pobar, a Facebook engineering manager. Facebook has been using the virtual machine, called the HipHop Virtual Machine (HHVM), across all of its servers since earlier this year.

Pobar discussed the virtual machine at the O'Reilly Open Source Conference (OSCON) being held this week in Portland, Oregon.

HHVM is not Facebook's first foray into customizing PHP for faster use. PHP is an interpreted language, meaning that the source code is executed by the processor directly. Generally speaking, programs written in interpreted languages such as PHP tend not to run as quickly as languages, such as C or C++, that have been compiled beforehand into machine language byte code. Facebook has remained loyal to PHP because it is widely understood by many of the Web programmers who work for the company.

To keep up with the insatiable user demand, however, Facebook originally devised a compiler, called HipHop, that would translate PHP code into C++, so it then it could be compiled ahead of time for faster performance.

While Facebook enjoyed considerable performance gains of this first version of HipHop for several years, it sought other ways to speed the delivery of the dynamically created Web pages to its billion or so users. "Our performance strategy for that was going to tap out," Pobar admitted.

HHVM is the next step for Facebook. Under development for about three years, HHVM actually works on the same principle as the Java Virtual Machine (JVM). HHVM has a just-in-time (JIT) compiler that converts the human readable source code into machine-readable byte code when it is needed. (The previous HipHop, renamed HPHPc, has now been retired within Facebook.)

This JIT approach allows the virtual machine to "make smarter decisions at runtime," Pobar said. For instance, if a call is made to the MySQL database to read a row of data, the HHVM can, on the fly, figure out what type of data it is, such as an integer or a string. It then can generate or call code on the fly that would be best suited for handling this particular type of data.

With the old HipHop, "the best it can do is analyze the entire Facebook codebase, reason about it and then specialize code based on its reasoning. But it can't get all of the reasoning right. There are parts of the code base that you can not simply infer about or reason about," Pobar said.

Pobar estimated that HHVM is about twice as fast as HPHPc was, and about nine times as fast as running straight PHP.

Facebook has posted the code for HHVM on GitHub, with the hopes that others will use it to speed their PHP websites as well.

HHVM is optimized for handling very large, and heavily used, PHP codebases. Pobar reckoned that using HHVM for standard sized websites, such as one hosting a Wordpress blog, would gain only about a fivefold performance improvement.

"If you take some PHP and run it in on HipHop, the CPU execution time [may] not be the limiting factor for performance. Chances are [the system is] spending too much time talking to the database or spending too time talking to [the] memcache" caching layer, Pobar said.

Facebook Is Erasing Doubts on Mobile

The social networking company said Wednesday that it had revved up its mobile advertising from virtually nothing a year ago to 41 percent of its total ad revenue of $1.6 billion in the second quarter.

“Soon we’ll have more revenue on mobile than desktop,” Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder and chief executive, said in a conference call with analysts.

Facebook’s results elated investors, who sent the company’s stock up nearly 17 percent, to $30.94, in after-hours trading.

Analysts said the strong performance dissipated lingering worries that the company could not adapt to the current Internet environment, in which users are relying more on mobile devices instead of personal computers to access the information they want.

Those concerns have dogged the company since its disappointing initial public offering in May 2012, in which it sold shares at $38 and then saw them fall by half.

“One of the biggest overhangs from their I.P.O. is that this company had been blindsided by mobile,” said Mark Mahaney, an analyst with RBC Capital Markets. “They caught up. Instead of being behind the curve on mobile, they are ahead of the curve.”

The company said it had net income of $333 million, or 13 cents a share, in the second quarter. Excluding stock-based compensation expenses, profits were $488 million or 19 cents a share, compared with $295 million, or 12 cents a share, in the second quarter a year ago.

The company’s revenue soared 53 percent, to $1.81 billion.

Facebook had particularly strong demand for ads that appear in its users’ news feeds, the flow of updates from friends that they see when they log on. About 1 in 20 posts in the news feed is an ad, and advertisers cannot seem to get enough of them.

The company expects those ads to continue to grow in the second half, its chief financial officer, David Ebersman, said in a conference call with analysts.

One concern for the future is whether Facebook will annoy its users if it significantly increases the number of ads in news feeds, said Debra Aho Williamson, an analyst with eMarketer, a research firm.

“How many ads will people tolerate?” she asked.

Mr. Zuckerberg said Facebook’s studies had shown that users were noticing ads more, and the company was working to improve the quality and relevance of ads.

Facebook is also studying when and how to introduce video ads, which are expected to command at least several hundred thousand dollars each.

“We have nothing to announce today,” Facebook’s chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, said in an interview. But she said video was “tremendously important” for users as well as marketers. Videos made and shared through Facebook’s new video feature in Instagram are growing quickly.

The company’s results also show how its users are continuing to shift toward mobile phones and tablets to use the site instead of a computer’s Web browser. Although the company’s total number of active monthly users worldwide grew slightly from the first quarter, to 1.15 billion, the number of people who use its mobile versions at least once a month grew 9 percent, to 819 million in that time.

Total ad revenue, a crucial measure watched by Wall Street, was $1.6 billion, up 61 percent from the second quarter of 2012. Of total ad revenue, 41 percent came from mobile, up from 30 percent in the first quarter.

“I think this shows that all the questions that people might have had in the past about whether Facebook could monetize on mobile devices, they’ve settled definitively,” Ms. Williamson said.

Users’ preference for reading Facebook on the go has created special revenue opportunities, like ads that prompt users to install mobile apps like games. But advertisers are generally willing to pay much less for a mobile ad than they are for the desktop.

The company’s sharp revenue growth reflects increased competition among advertisers to reach Facebook’s large user base, said Rob Jewell, chief executive of Spruce Media, a firm that helps advertisers like McDonald’s and the insurer Progressive to buy ads on the social network and measure their effectiveness.

Facebook’s ad rates are generally set through a bidding process, and Mr. Jewell said that his clients paid about 10 percent more on average for ads in the second quarter than in the first quarter. Ads in the news feed, both on the desktop and mobile versions of Facebook, were in particularly high demand, with rates up about 75 percent from the first quarter for both categories, he said.

“Facebook is the best channel for mobile app advertisers to purchase advertising,” Mr. Jewell said.

In the second quarter of 2012, the company reported a net loss of $743 million, or 8 cents a share. But that figure included $1.3 billion in compensation expenses related to the company’s initial public offering. In the year ago quarter, Facebook’s revenue was $1.2 billion.

The company far exceeded Wall Street’s expectations. Analysts had predicted the company would report earnings of 14 cents a share, excluding stock compensation costs, on revenue of $1.62 billion, according to a survey by Thomson Reuters.

Facebook’s surprisingly strong second-quarter earnings contrasted with those of Google, which last week reported disappointing profits in mobile advertising.

While the two companies are not strictly comparable because Facebook is expanding its ads from a much a smaller base, Ronald Josey, an analyst at JMP Securities, said Facebook was doing extremely well in mobile categories like ads prompting users to install new mobile applications.

“This company is becoming more and more of a mobile company,” he said. 

Facebook Open Compute project has "weaknesses," Cisco CEO says

Facebook's Open Compute project, which is working on open source servers and switches, will be limited by "weaknesses" in scope that Cisco can exploit, CEO John Chambers said this week.

In an exclusive interview with Network World where he also touched on the consumer market and EMC alliance, Chambers said efforts like Facebook's to commoditise and wring cost out of hardware purchases will open up opportunities for Cisco to provide solutions that are better tailored to specific customer needs.
"I think this will just be one more series of good challenges that Cisco will say 'what's the business objective on,'" Chambers said of Open Compute. "There are a lot of weaknesses to the area -- we're going to go back and solve customer problems. If you're standalone anything, this is going to be a hard market to play in. Anything white label, where the decision is cost or opex, you're going to lose."
[WHAT CHAMBERS SAID:Cisco building an Internet of Everything router]

What Cisco will not do is sit around and let Open Compute proponents and supporters guide the discussion on commodity switches and servers. Cisco's messaging will be proactive instead of reactive this time.
"What we will not do is leave that concept alone like we did SDN, and allow other people to gain the high ground and then play defense," Chambers said. "This one you will see us out ahead of the game on."
Chambers also addressed Cisco's exit from the consumer market after failures with the Flip videocam and umi TelePresence system, and the recent divestiture of Linksys. Cisco was late addressing opportunities in that market and they ultimately passed the company by.

"Consumer-to-consumer, we're out," Chambers said.  "We missed our window on areas such as Flip and even Linksys. And we made the mistake of getting too fascinated with the device. I love my Flip camera, but it was about FlipShare (video software) in the cloud to any smartphone that would have outmaneuvered Apple. And my team just missed it. Shame on me for not catching it."

Chambers said Cisco is still in the business-to-consumer market through various channels. He said Cisco will not enter markets where it can't gain "sustainable differentiation," 40% share and alignment with its core networking business.

Alignment is also key to the VCE data center coalition Cisco owns with EMC. EMC and its VMware business have been increasingly competitive with Cisco outside of VCE, yet Chambers insists the joint venture is "going to have a good life cycle."

"EMC is a very important strategic partner with us," Chambers said. "VMware is a partner at times, competitor at times."

VMware's entry into networking via the Nicira acquisition strained relations between EMC and Cisco, but turned out to be "the best thing to happen" to the company, Chambers said.
"Even though I wish VMware did not get into networking it was the best thing to happen to us because once they did, then we went back to what we do best:  open architecture, support four hypervisors, not tied to any vendor for strategic long term direction," Chambers said.

Facebook to acquire UK startup Monoidics

Facebook is to acquire UK startup Monoidics, which makes code verification and analysis tools and specialises in detecting coding errors.

The tools are aimed at helping developers to deliver bug-free code, improve security and identify critical components and areas of risk.

Facebook has not disclosed the value of the deal, but once it closes, the Monoidics technical team will join Facebook’s engineering team in London, according to a statement on the company’s website.

“Joining the Facebook team opens up a world of new opportunity for our technology and for our individual and collective scientific expertise,” the statement said.

Monoidics was founded in 2009 by Italian entrepreneur Dino Di Stefano, and is based in London's Silicon Roundabout area around Old Street, with offices in Seattle and Tokyo.

Through the acquisition, Facebook is seeking to improve the reliability of its mobile apps, which have been criticised for being slow and unreliable, according to the Telegraph.

Facebook has begun upgrading its smartphone apps regularly as its 1.1bn users increasingly access the social networking site through mobile devices.

The acquisition of Monoidics will allow Facebook to improve the speed at which it can verify that the apps are secure and bug-free.  

Mac Gems: Moment puts Facebook in your menubar

There are oodles of apps for keeping tabs on Twitter from your Mac, but few options for monitoring Facebook. Moment ; Mac App Store link), a $4 app from Tapmates, is here to help.

Moment lives in your menubar. It lights up—and sounds an alert—whenever you receive a new Facebook notification. Click the menu icon, and you see your notifications, old and new alike. (Older ones are dimmed to make it easier to spot the new ones.) It’s the same list you could expect to see if you viewed your notifications list on the Facebook website.

Click a notification, and the Moment menu vanishes, opening the appropriate Facebook page in your Web browser of choice. It’s a shame Moment doesn’t simply display the page directly within the app, though such a feature is clearly beyond the scope of what Moment had in mind. Leaving its cozy confines for the wilds of Facebook proper, however, is always a disappointment.

Where Moment really shines, however, is in facilitating posting to Facebook. To post a photo to your timeline in a flash, just drag the photo onto Moment’s menubar icon, optionally add a text status to go with it, and click the Post button. Alternatively, you can just click the menu icon, type your status update, and (optionally) drag in an image. Want to post a video, or a link to a webpage? You can drag those, too—Moment knows precisely how to handle them.

A nice touch is that you can add friends to a post or photo by simply typing their name(s) in the Who Were You With? area. Moment automatically finishes the name(s) based on your friends list on Facebook.

Moment is tidy, elegant, and makes quick work of updating your Facebook status and keeping tabs on your notifications. If those features appeal to you, the app’s sure to please.

A New Tool Aims to Help Facebook Users Dig Deep

But just try finding that photo of Mom and Dad in front of the Eiffel Tower during their 2008 trip to Paris, or the name of that lovely bistro nearby that they mentioned in a status update. Odds are, you would have to plow through a lot of old posts and photos to dig out that information, if you could find it at all.

Now, Facebook is trying to make it easier to find that lost photo or restaurant recommendation and unearth other information buried within your social network with a tool it calls Graph Search.

On Monday, the company will roll out the feature to its several hundred million users in the United States and to others who use the American English version of the site. Other languages will follow.

Developing a sophisticated search feature is vital to Facebook’s long-term success, both to deepen users’ engagement and to make it more appealing to advertisers.

Experts say that Facebook’s technical achievement so far is impressive. Privacy could still be an issue, however, as more user data becomes easily accessible. Also, the feature is dependent on Facebook users volunteering more information about their likes and dislikes.

Ever since Facebook released an early version of the tool in January, the development team has been observing and listening to millions of testers and making improvements. “We launched it early, when it still was in a pretty raw state,” Lars Rasmussen, the engineering director of the project, acknowledged in a recent interview.

Early on, Mr. Rasmussen said, users had trouble even finding the search box, which was blue and melded into the border at the top of every Facebook page. The team eventually made the box white and used words to explicitly describe its purpose.

The tool also has struggled to understand how people actually use language.

For example, typing in “surfers who live in Santa Cruz” confounded the search engine, which was tuned to recognize the phrase “people who like to surf” but not synonyms like surfers or “people who like surfing,” said Loren Cheng, who leads the team of linguists who are working to refine the tool’s natural language capabilities.

The engineers also had to adapt the algorithms to consider the many ways that people express interest in a topic.

For example, Mr. Rasmussen, a ballet fan, said that when he looked for “friends who like ballet,” only two popped up. But many more friends had liked the pages of individual ballet companies. So the search engine now takes into account related pages when assessing whether users like a topic.

Facebook’s Graph Search is still a work in progress, as company officials are quick to acknowledge. Its recognition of synonyms and related topics is spotty. It cannot yet find information in status updates, a top request from users. It does not yet incorporate information from third-party apps like Yelp or Instagram, which is owned by Facebook. And the new search tool is not available on Facebook’s mobile apps, which are increasingly the way that people use the service.

But Facebook believes it is now good enough for wide release. And despite the tool’s limitations, technologists praised the company’s work.

“There is a near infinite variety of ways to say anything in English or in any other language,” said Nick Cassimatis, an associate professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and a co-founder of SkyPhrase, a start-up working on similar natural-language search technology. “They are trying to memorize all the ways of saying something.”

Unlike Google’s familiar search engine, which typically takes the keywords entered into a search box and matches them to the most relevant Web pages that contain them, Facebook’s search looks primarily at structured data.


Follow me on Twitter @sajilpl

Review: Get those precious Facebook moments backed up sharpish with PhotoGrabber

Making backups of everything you put online is always a sound policy. You never know when a site is going to get hacked, shutter their virtual doors, or just decide to shut down your account for whatever reason. One site that makes data backups a really good idea is Facebook.

PhotoGrabber's list of Facebook friends and pages puts you first.
Although they are not likely to shut down their site anytime soon, Facebook has been known to shut down user accounts without warning for some perceived infraction of the rules. In instances like this, a free open-source app called Photograbber would be a good thing to have in your back pocket.

I prefer similar program fbDownloader because it feels easier to use and is a little more flexible as to what you can download. But PhotoGrabber still has its pros and is definitely worth looking at, especially if you have a soft spot for open source software.

Unlike fbDownloader, PhotoGrabber does not ask you to type in your password, and instead relies on an authentication token issued by Facebook's API. This means that you can revoke PhotoGrabber's access at any time by going to the list of approved apps in your Facebook account and deleting it. This is PhotoGrabber's first big plus, as I am always leery of entering my Facebook password anywhere but the official site.

PhotoGrabber then generates another "login token" which you must enter into the app for it to work. Unfortunately, you need a new login token for every download you want to do. If you want to download from several friends for example, then it shuts down each time and you have to restart it and enter a new login token again. It's rather annoying.

When you enter the login token, you will see a list of all your Facebook friends, Facebook Pages you have subscribed to, and you will be at the top of that list if you want to download your own stuff. FbDownloader doesn't include Pages, so this is a point in PhotoGrabber's favor. Simply choose the person or page you want to download from, specify what you want to download and off you go.

Every time you want to use the app, the developer's site generates an authentication token, which you must put into the app for it to work.
This is where I have to make one rather large caveat. Even though some of the photos may be publicly viewable, you may not be able to download them using PhotoGrabber because a user has the ability to block apps, including PhotoGrabber, from viewing their data. So PhotoGrabber can only "grab" what it is allowed to. So if you see 300 photos on the page, but PhotoGrabber only gives you 200, then that's why.

The major reason I prefer fbDownloader over this app is because PhotoGrabber is rather restrictive when it comes to you specifying what you want to download. For example, it's either download "all the albums" or nothing. In fbDownloader, you could choose which albums you wanted. Here, you get the whole lot.

But the biggest plus for PhotoGrabber is that you can pull in all the comments and tags. If you choose this option, then PhotoGrabber generates an HTML page so you can view this information alongside the photos. This in theory means that you could back these pages up to your own personal domain as another online backup.

PhotoGrabber is under active development. If you make backing up something of a religion, then PhotoGrabber is a tool you should use on a continual basis, as well as keeping an eye on the project page over on Google Code.

Facebook to Shield Ads From Offensive Content

In a message posted on its Web site, the company wrote: “Our goal is to both preserve the freedoms of sharing on Facebook but also protect people and brands from certain types of content.”
“We know that marketers work hard to promote their brands, and we take their objectives seriously. While we already have rigorous review and removal policies for content against our terms, we recognize we need to do more to prevent situations where ads are displayed alongside controversial Pages and Groups. So we are taking action.”
Facebook said it would begin the manual review for pages containing sensitive content next week with a team of hundreds of employees in offices around the world.
The action comes a month after feminist groups campaigned for an improvement in Facebook’s process for identifying and removing pages that glorify violence against women. At the time, Facebook acknowledged that its procedures had not worked effectively. Activist groups sent more than 5,000 e-mails to Facebook’s advertisers and elicited more than 60,000 posts on Twitter, requesting the removal of pages featuring women who had been abused.
The protests caused Nissan and a number of smaller advertisers to temporarily withdraw their ads from the site. Other advertisers, including Zappos, Dove and American Express, stopped short of removing their ads but issued statements on digital media saying they did not support violence against women.
“The way you allocate your resources identifies what your priorities are,” said Soraya Chemaly, a writer and activist who was involved in the digital media campaign.
Ms. Chemaly said that since the protests in May Facebook had been “great” about removing content the groups flagged as offensive but that the procedure for removing such content had not been systematic. “Before you can remove the ads, you need to have an accurate assessment of what counts as controversial and that’s not happening now systemically,” she said.
Elisabeth Diana, a Facebook spokeswoman, said dealing with offensive content was something the company handled on a daily basis. “We take it really, really seriously,” she said, adding that the goal of the new procedure “won’t be as much content policing as there will be advertising policing.”
Removing the ads from such pages also removes a pressure point that activist groups have used to get media companies and advertisers to listen to their concerns. “They are hoping to dismantle the leverage,” Ms. Chemaly said. “From a business perspective that makes perfect logical sense.”
The company expects to automate the process of identifying such content after a manual review of thousands of its pages.
Follow me on Twitter @sajilpl

Facebook, Foursquare, and Flipboard lead a flood of big-name Windows 8 apps

Don’t be fooled by all this blabber about Windows 8.1 being Microsoft’s grand chance for a re-do—talk I’m admittedly guilty of myself. Windows 8.1 does a terrific job of refining Microsoft’s modern-style vision, but as an operating system built from the ground up to revolve around an app-based experience, it—and specifically the Start screen—can never truly shine unless the Windows Store is stuffed.

 

That’s a big problem, since both the quantity and the quality of the Windows Store’s selection has been lackluster thus far. Microsoft seems to be tackling the issue head-on, though: Not only did the number of apps in the Windows Store spike in the weeks ahead of Build 2013, but Microsoft took advantage of the developer conference to announce a slew of high-profile apps coming to Windows 8’s virtual marketplace.

 

Here’s a rundown of the biggest apps destined to land on the Windows Store’s currently dusty shelves.

Yes! A Facebook app is coming to the Windows Store.

Finally—finally—a proper Facebook app is coming to Windows 8, where we hope it will embrace the modern style as wholeheartedly as the Windows 8 Twitter app. While no official launch date was announced, you can look forward to a day where “Pin an IE shortcut to the Start screen” isn’t Microsoft’s official answer to the missing Facebook-app question.



Yes, the popular social check-in service is coming to Windows 8 at some unspecified point in the future, Microsoft announced yesterday. Live Tile fanatics will no longer have to rely on third-party alternative apps to become the mayor of their favorite taco carts! The few screenshots Microsoft showd really seem to nail the modern motif.

MicrosoftFlipboard was one of three apps Steve Ballmer specifically mentioned at Wednesday’s Build 2013 keynote.

Don’t worry, we’ll get to apps that don’t start with F soon.

 

Flipboard is a newsreader app with an image-heavy style that should translate well to Windows 8. It’s similar to the Microsoft-exclusive New Bento. Flipboard pulls in not just news, but also posts from your various social feeds, making it close to a one-stop, up-to-the-minute news shop. It’s incredibly popular on iOS and Android, so look for the app to make waves in the Windows Store whenever it launches, too.



Streaming music services haven’t exactly stampeded to Microsoft’s camp. Aside from Slacker Radio, Nokia Music, a couple of apps that play digital streams of terrestrial radio, and Microsoft’s own baked-in Music app, all has been quiet on the Windows front. Microsoft’s storefront still doesn’t have dedicated Pandora, Spotify, MOG, or Rdio apps—but now, it does rock one of the most storied names in streaming music: Rhapsody.

 

Available now, the Rhapsody app is free, though you’ll need a premium Rhapsody subscription to use it. Don’t have one of those? You can sign up for a free trial right from the app’s starting screen.



OpenTable lets you make real-time reservations at tens of thousands of restaurants across the country, making it handy-dandy for Windows-tablet-wielding foodies. Seriously, if a restaurant has any sort of Web presence whatsoever, you can probably find it on OpenTable—and you can find the OpenTable app in the Windows Store right now.



Rockmelt is kind of like Flipboard, but with a few extra wrinkles. In addition to displaying the sites, YouTube feeds, and social feeds you follow (in modern-tinged visual fashion, natch) on the opening screens, Rockmelt lets you check out the latest news in more than a dozen preset categories, like Cars, Business, Travel, and Tech & Geek. It’s a pretty nifty app, and it, too, is available in the Windows Store right now.

 

Now we know what all those NFL coaches are doing with all those Surface tablets: Playing fantasy football! At the Build keynote on Wednesday, Steve Ballmer announced that NFL apps are Windows 8-bound, starting with a Fantasy Football app. The exact release date is yet to be announced, but here’s hoping we’ll see it before opening day (September 5, in case you were curious).



The somewhat creepily named Where’s My Mickey? is already available in the Windows Store, but that’s just the tip of the torrent. Microsoft announced that Avengers: Initiative, Monsters University, Temple Run: Oz, Toy Story Smash It!, and Wreck-It Ralph apps are all inbound this fall.

 

That’s a flood of fairly big-name apps. In the weeks and months ahead of Build 2013, we saw additional high-profile Windows Store releases like MLB.tv, Nokia Music, Twitter, Vevo, and a Discovery Channel app. Build also brought a momentous under-the-hood announcement when the uber-popular Unity game engine announced support for Windows 8, along with Windows Phone 8 and Xbox One. And of course, Windows 8.1 packs a few new native apps of its own, like Reading List and Health & Fitness.

 

Yes, there are still some prominent Windows Store no-shows, but the recent announcements show that Microsoft’s wooing of developers is finally starting to pay off. The Windows Store still has a long road to travel before it becomes a compelling destination, but at least it finally appears to be on the right track.

 

The next question: Can Microsoft keep up the momentum, or did it exhaust all its star power in a big Build blow-out? Keep an eye on the Windows Store in the coming months.

 

 

Review: Download Facebook photos and albums with fbDownloader

fbDownloader We put more of our lives on Facebook than we realize or like to admit. If you lose access, you lose data…so back it up.

 

Download Now

You may or may not realize it, but you put a lot of your life on Facebook.  The social networking website gets its hooks into everyone, making them lose their inhibitions about revealing everything in their lives, including all the latest snapshots. If this sounds like you, you may want to use fbDownloader to create a secondary backup of those pictures.

 

"But Mark," I hear you ask, "why should I bother with a backup?  Isn't the Facebook site secure enough to hold all of my crazy party pictures?" Well yes, but up to a point. Facebook accounts can be hacked. Even if you have the foresight to turn on "Login Approvals," which is Facebook's version of two-factor authentication, there are no guarantees.

After starting fbDownloader, you will see your options on the main screen. On the left, you can choose either your photos or your friend's public photos.

Plus it isn't just hackers you should be concerned about. Facebook makes the rules, and if it doesn't like the way you interpret them, the company can shut your account down without warning (which they've been known to do). If that happens, then goodbye photos. It may not just be your party pics that get zapped. Precious and irreplaceable family photos would also disappear.

 

It pays to have an insurance policy. If a hacker or Facebook ruins your day by cutting off your access to your Facebook account, and everything in it, then you will have a perfectly organized backup offsite.

 

After downloading fbDownloader, install it the usual way (taking care uncheck the boxes for bloatware and browser settings changes).  Once installed, it will ask you to log into your Facebook account (when you are finished, you can revoke its access) and then the main screen will come up. It will give you three options to choose from: download your own tagged photos, download your photo albums, and download your Facebook friends' public photo albums. Choose the option you want and the screen will change accordingly.

If you choose the photo album option, you will see all of your albums in the app and you just have to click on the ones you want.

You can also choose whether or not you want the photos in color or in black and white (although the black and white option requires first that you "recommend" them on Facebook).

 

The first option, the tagged photos, is just a "click and wait for it all to download" deal. You can't pick and choose which pictures you want. It's either everything or nothing. But if you choose the second option, your photo albums, then you have a bit more flexibility. You can view each of your albums in a list and choose which albums you want downloaded to your computer (although you still can't choose individual pictures).

 

The same applies to your friends' albums. You can choose the album, but you can't choose a specific picture. This isn't so much of a problem if the album in question only has a few photos inside it. But some albums have hundreds of photos and if you only want a few, you'd better limber up your Delete key finger.

You'll want to uncheck all those boxes before clicking "Agree & Continue."

One other issue I encountered was that once the downloading process has started, there is absolutely no way to make it stop, except shutting down the program completely. There's no "cancel" option, which is an unusual omission in this kind of program.

 

These small nitpicks aside, this is a nice little program that allows you to backup your Facebook pictures easily, without too much hassle. If fbDownloader doesn't tickle your tastebuds, though, then PhotoGrabber is another solid choice. There's no harm in trying both and seeing which one you prefer.

 

The moral of the story is: Don't rely on just one site for data of any kind. Always have at least one backup elsewhere. For Facebook, these two apps will more than suffice.

 

Note: The Download button takes you to the vendor's site, where you can download the latest version of the software.

 

 

Facebook, Foursquare, and Flipboard lead a flood of big-name Windows 8 apps

Don’t be fooled by all this blabber about Windows 8.1 being Microsoft’s grand chance for a re-do—talk I’m admittedly guilty of myself. Windows 8.1 does a terrific job of refining Microsoft’s modern-style vision, but as an operating system built from the ground up to revolve around an app-based experience, it—and specifically the Start screen—can never truly shine unless the Windows Store is stuffed.

 

That’s a big problem, since both the quantity and the quality of the Windows Store’s selection has been lackluster thus far. Microsoft seems to be tackling the issue head-on, though: Not only did the number of apps in the Windows Store spike in the weeks ahead of Build 2013, but Microsoft took advantage of the developer conference to announce a slew of high-profile apps coming to Windows 8’s virtual marketplace.

 

Here’s a rundown of the biggest apps destined to land on the Windows Store’s currently dusty shelves.

Yes! A Facebook app is coming to the Windows Store.

Finally—finally—a proper Facebook app is coming to Windows 8, where we hope it will embrace the modern style as wholeheartedly as the Windows 8 Twitter app. While no official launch date was announced, you can look forward to a day where “Pin an IE shortcut to the Start screen” isn’t Microsoft’s official answer to the missing Facebook-app question.



Yes, the popular social check-in service is coming to Windows 8 at some unspecified point in the future, Microsoft announced yesterday. Live Tile fanatics will no longer have to rely on third-party alternative apps to become the mayor of their favorite taco carts! The few screenshots Microsoft showd really seem to nail the modern motif.

MicrosoftFlipboard was one of three apps Steve Ballmer specifically mentioned at Wednesday’s Build 2013 keynote.

Don’t worry, we’ll get to apps that don’t start with F soon.

 

Flipboard is a newsreader app with an image-heavy style that should translate well to Windows 8. It’s similar to the Microsoft-exclusive New Bento. Flipboard pulls in not just news, but also posts from your various social feeds, making it close to a one-stop, up-to-the-minute news shop. It’s incredibly popular on iOS and Android, so look for the app to make waves in the Windows Store whenever it launches, too.



Streaming music services haven’t exactly stampeded to Microsoft’s camp. Aside from Slacker Radio, Nokia Music, a couple of apps that play digital streams of terrestrial radio, and Microsoft’s own baked-in Music app, all has been quiet on the Windows front. Microsoft’s storefront still doesn’t have dedicated Pandora, Spotify, MOG, or Rdio apps—but now, it does rock one of the most storied names in streaming music: Rhapsody.

 

Available now, the Rhapsody app is free, though you’ll need a premium Rhapsody subscription to use it. Don’t have one of those? You can sign up for a free trial right from the app’s starting screen.



OpenTable lets you make real-time reservations at tens of thousands of restaurants across the country, making it handy-dandy for Windows-tablet-wielding foodies. Seriously, if a restaurant has any sort of Web presence whatsoever, you can probably find it on OpenTable—and you can find the OpenTable app in the Windows Store right now.



Rockmelt is kind of like Flipboard, but with a few extra wrinkles. In addition to displaying the sites, YouTube feeds, and social feeds you follow (in modern-tinged visual fashion, natch) on the opening screens, Rockmelt lets you check out the latest news in more than a dozen preset categories, like Cars, Business, Travel, and Tech & Geek. It’s a pretty nifty app, and it, too, is available in the Windows Store right now.

 

Now we know what all those NFL coaches are doing with all those Surface tablets: Playing fantasy football! At the Build keynote on Wednesday, Steve Ballmer announced that NFL apps are Windows 8-bound, starting with a Fantasy Football app. The exact release date is yet to be announced, but here’s hoping we’ll see it before opening day (September 5, in case you were curious).



The somewhat creepily named Where’s My Mickey? is already available in the Windows Store, but that’s just the tip of the torrent. Microsoft announced that Avengers: Initiative, Monsters University, Temple Run: Oz, Toy Story Smash It!, and Wreck-It Ralph apps are all inbound this fall.

 

That’s a flood of fairly big-name apps. In the weeks and months ahead of Build 2013, we saw additional high-profile Windows Store releases like MLB.tv, Nokia Music, Twitter, Vevo, and a Discovery Channel app. Build also brought a momentous under-the-hood announcement when the uber-popular Unity game engine announced support for Windows 8, along with Windows Phone 8 and Xbox One. And of course, Windows 8.1 packs a few new native apps of its own, like Reading List and Health & Fitness.

 

Yes, there are still some prominent Windows Store no-shows, but the recent announcements show that Microsoft’s wooing of developers is finally starting to pay off. The Windows Store still has a long road to travel before it becomes a compelling destination, but at least it finally appears to be on the right track.

 

The next question: Can Microsoft keep up the momentum, or did it exhaust all its star power in a big Build blow-out? Keep an eye on the Windows Store in the coming months.

 

 

Prism implicates Facebook, Yahoo and others in Europe, student group charges

The U.S. government surveillance program known as Prism, which reportedly collects data from major technology companies, has compelled a European student group to file a barrage of complaints against the companies, claiming the data collection runs afoul of European privacy laws.

 

The complaints were recently filed in Ireland against Facebook and Apple, in Luxembourg against Skype and Microsoft, and in Germany against Yahoo. The complaints are directed at the companies' European subsidiaries.

 

The Austrian student group Europe-v-Facebook.org said that while the Prism scandal is playing out in the U.S., "most of the involved companies conduct their business through subsidiaries in the EU in order to avoid U.S. taxes." This means that the companies must abide by European privacy laws, the group said.

 

The basis of the group's complaints concerns how the companies export their user data back to their U.S. counterparts. When a European company sends that data back to its U.S. parent company, that is considered an "export" of the data, the group said, which is only allowed if the subsidiary can ensure an "adequate level or protection" in the foreign country, the group said Wednesday in a statement.

 

However, "after the recent disclosures on the Prism program, such trust in an 'adequate level of protection' by the involved companies can hardly be upheld," the group said.

 

In their privacy policies, some of the largest tech companies say that they will share users' personal information to meet applicable laws, regulations, legal processes or enforceable government requests.

 

Since Prism's revelations have ripped trough the technology industry and the privacy landscape more broadly, companies like Facebook, Google, Twitter and Microsoft have called for greater transparency in disclosure of data on government requests for customer information.

 

Yahoo, for instance, has since disclosed some of its user data requests, but companies have had a harder time clearing the way to specifically reveal requests made under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which has been at the center of the Prism controversy.

 

"For European subsidiaries of the involved companies, American 'gag order' does not apply," the student group said Wednesday, adding, "in contrast to that, the companies are even under an obligation to tell the truth under European proceedings."

 

Germany, Luxembourg and Ireland must now decide whether it is legal for European companies to mass-transfer personal data to a foreign intelligence agency, the group said.

 

"We want a clear statement by the authorities if a European company may simply give foreign intelligence agencies access to its customer data," it said.

 

"If this turns out to be legal, then we might have to change the laws," it added.

 

In recent weeks, Europe's justice commissioner has pledged that Europeans' rights would not be sacrificed for U.S. national security.

 

The student group also seeks more clarity from the tech companies on how they handle users' personal data under European procedures.

 

Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Skype and Yahoo could not be immediately reached to comment on the complaints.

 

In 2006, E.U. data protection authorities already decided in a case involving the payment processor Swift that a mass transfer of data to the U.S. authorities is illegal under EU law, the student group said.

 

Google and YouTube were not included in the first round of complaints, the group said, because they do not use European intermediaries.

 

"But since Google has data centers in Ireland, Belgium and Finland, we can take similar actions on a slightly different path," they said.

 

Follow me on Twitter @sajilpl

Researcher nets $20K for finding serious Facebook flaw

A U.K.-based researcher has netted US$20,000 for spotting a very serious flaw in Facebook that could have allowed an attacker to take over anyone's account with minimal effort.

The flaw was fixed by Facebook about a month ago, wrote Jack Whitten, an application security engineer who posted a post-mortem on his blog.

Whitten found it was possible to reset the password of anyone's account by exploiting an error in how Facebook lets users link their mobile phone to their account for purposes such as receiving updates over SMS.

Facebook sends a verification code by SMS when a user registers a phone. But Whitten found it was possible to modify the "profile_id" field within the mobile confirmation form to that of a different user.

Facebook then asks for a password but not the one of the potential victim, Whitten wrote. The account of the victim is then inadvertently linked with the attacker.

Whitten then initiated a password reset on the victim's account. The code needed to reset that password was sent to Whitten's phone, along with a link to a password reset page.

"We enter this code into the form, choose a new password, and we're done. The account is ours," Whitten wrote.

A flaw such as the one found by Whitten would have had value among cyberattackers seeking to abuse Facebook accounts for spam or for the theft of personal data.

"The bounty assigned to this bug was $20,000, clearly demonstrating the severity of the issue," he wrote.

Whitten, who goes by the screen name "fin1te," has been recognized for finding vulnerabilities by Google, Facebook and Etsy.

 

Facebook breach highlights data security's "weakest link" syndrome

Facebook recently disclosed that a system glitch resulted in the exposure of sensitive personal data from as many as six million users. The impact from this particular breach seems relatively inconsequential, but it’s a sign of a larger problem when it comes to protecting personal data on the Web.

 

Let’s start with a little about the incident itself. The Facebook data breach is related to the Download Your Information feature. When someone downloads their Facebook contact data, the glitch exposed email addresses and personal phone numbers for contacts even if that data was not visible on Facebook itself.

A glitch exposed data on six million Facebook accounts.

Facebook resolved the issue within 24 hours of being notified, and publicly disclosed the incident on its blog last Friday. There was a delay between the incident response and disclosure to give Facebook time to inform regulators and affected customers of the breach.

 

Six million is a big number in some contexts; but to be fair to Facebook, it represents only one half of one percent of the 1.1 billion Facebook users. When you consider how big the breach could have been, or the recent revelations alleging that the NSA has access to virtually all data from everywhere, the Facebook breach almost seems trivial.

 

Government monitoring aside, people still value privacy, and they have a reasonable expectation that if they configure their Facebook account not to disclose specific sensitive details, then that data will be protected. In this case—at least for the six million affected users—it was not.

 

Tripwire CTO Dwayne Melancon explains: “The Facebook breach highlights the 'weakest link' syndrome with information security. As the number of indirect connections and relationships between applications and data proliferate, it becomes easier for unintended disclosure of data to occur.”

When data is shared between parties, there will always be a "weakest link."

The Facebook glitch, according to Melancon, highlights the need for greater end-to-end awareness and validation of data security controls. Facebook—and companies trusted with sensitive data in general—should have strong security configuration management all the way from the servers through the applications and the user permissions assigned to the data.

 

While it’s only peripherally related, do you know how many apps have permission to access or interact with your Facebook account? Go to the Privacy Settings and Tools in Facebook, and click Apps in the left pane. I think you’ll be shocked.

 

I found that there are 207 apps connected to or associated with my Facebook account in some way. Each one has unique settings to control who can see information from it and what information the app has access to. That’s 207 opportunities for me to miss something or somehow screw up the privacy controls and expose data I would rather not share with the general public.

 

It’s a good idea to review the apps associated with your Facebook account. Remove the ones you don’t use or don’t even remember giving access to in the first place, and then check the permissions granted to the apps that are left to make sure they reflect the way you want your data to be treated.

 

There will always be a “weakest link.” You can reduce the risk, though, by minimizing the number of companies and apps that have access to your personal information in the first place, and spending a little time to understand the associated privacy controls and make sure you’ve configured your data protection to the best of your ability.